It is well known that bee feeders can be utilized to feed domesticated bees during the early spring to increase the hive population in order to increase the annual production of honey. The queen bee and worker bees of the hive sense the level of honey that sustains the hive throughout the winter and do not allow brood rearing to drastically increase until the bees have begun to increase the supply of honey in the spring. This is done in order to insure that there will always be sufficient honey to feed the hive as bees can only live for a short period of time without honey. Since the eggs that the queen bee lays take twenty-one days to develop into a worker bee, and then another three weeks before the bee is a forager, it is desirable to feed the hive liquid feed such as sugar water in early spring to build up the population of bees to replace those that have died through the winter. Consequently, this feeding increases the number of bees in the hive well in advance of the main honey flow so as to provide a greater production of honey throughout the year.
Many problems are encountered in attempting to feed domesticated bees with prior art feeders. For example, one conventional way to feed bees is to fill a large mouthed jar with sugar water and then close the jar with a cover having holes punched in it before turning the jar upside down and placing it on top of a bee hive. Filling the jar and then maintaining it balanced in place does not sound particularly difficult until one understands that commercial beekeepers must do this operation for several hundred to as many as a thousand or more hives within a relatively short period of time in order to effectively feed the bees and thereby prematurely begin the honey production that stimulates the queen bee to start laying eggs. Also, the rate at which the bees can feed from the jars is limited by the rate at which the sugar water can flow through the holes punched in the cover as the vacuum in the upper end of the jar maintains the sugar water suspended against flow down through the holes. Inverted jars have also been utilized adjacent the entrance to the hive but such usage presents problems in that bees from other hives can feed on the sugar water and thus rob the hive being fed.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,526,913 discloses a bee feeder including a box that is mounted on an outer side of the hive body. Such a feeder is necessarily subjected to the colder nighttime temperature during the early springtime and causes the bees to cluster adjacent each other in order to keep warm rather than continuing to feed throughout the night. This nighttime stoppage can be a problem when one remembers that the beekeeper must rapidly feed many hives and does not want to have to have a separate feeder for each hive.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,978,534 discloses a bee feeder that is mounted on top of the hive body beneath the conventional top cover. This feeder is made from wood and includes a reservoir with a bottom board that slopes downwardly toward a baffle which has openings to a trough where feeding takes place. The baffle confines the bees to the trough to prevent them from drowning in the liquid feed within the reservoir.
U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,835,487 and 3,842,457 disclose molded plastic section board feeders that are mounted within the hive body suspended like the section boards where honey production is normally stored by the bees prior to removal by the beekeeper during harvesting. Both of these bee feeders are limited in the amount of feed that can be supplied at any one filling to something on the order of a gallon or less and do not provide any absolute prevention against drowning as the bees feed.
Another prior art bee feeder heretofore utilized was made from wood with a box-like construction designed to be mounted on top of the hive. A center opening in the bottom of this bee feeder had a square wood column extending upwardly surrounded by a screen spaced therefrom and capped by a suitable cover that confined the bees to the space between the screen and the square column. While this feeder was desirable in that is prevented drowning, the wood construction of the feeder made it difficult to manufacture and time consuming for the beekeeper to maintain it in repair when nails or staples began to come out after use for some period of time. Also, hive bodies are normally tipped so that moisture will not collect within the hive and this tipping caused the liquid feed to be positioned away from the screen enclosed wood column so that the bees could not empty the feeder.